The EPA made what is called an “endangerment finding” a while back which asserts that it is appropriate to regulate the release of greenhouse gasses. This was challenged in court by science deinialists and energy interests via “the state of Virginia, the industry front-group Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Tea Party-industry front Southeastern Legal Foundation.”

The endangerment finding is based on a large and internally consist ant corpus of scientific findings. The argument against the finding is in conflict with what we know from a scientific perspective, and is rather self serving for the interests involved.

These snazy headlines are all pointing to a recent paper in Nature Communications. The paper’s methodology is pretty simple: They took 74 Latvian men and immunized them against Hepatitis B. Later, they measured the participants’ blood for levels of HepB antibody, as well as levels of testosterone. Finally, they showed photographs of each of the participants to a panel of ladies, asking them to rate the subjects’ attractiveness. As far as I can tell, Brad Pitt was not involved in this study.

After some analysis they determine a few things -
a) Men with higher levels of testosterone have statistically higher levels of anti-HepB antibodies after vaccination.
b) Men that were rated as more attractive by the female judges had statistically higher levels of testosterone.
c) Men that were rated more attractive had statistically higher levels of anti-HepB antibodies.

This is reported in all the stories above as “Higher testosterone makes your immune system better! Higher testosterone is sexy! Women are attracted to a better immune system!” As you might suspect, it’s a good deal more complicated than that.

There. Is that enough? No, it is not. We must also crash a stupid online poll. Devastate it, please. It’s on a site run by dishonest quacks, so I think we have the potential to smash their poll so thoroughly that either they a) shut it down in embarrassment, or b) start faking the numbers.

Yesterday was a rough day for me; so I’ll be uncharacteristically brief today.

As I’ve pointed out time and time again, these days, advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) don’t like it so much anymore when their preferred quackery is referred to as “CAM.” Now the preferred term has–shall we say?–evolved to a happy term designed to paint their woo as being co-equal with real medicine: “integrative medicine” in a way that the term “CAM” does not. After all, CAM is “complementary,” which implies that it’s subsidiary, the icing on the cake so to speak, and it’s “alternative,” which implies (correctly, I might add) that it’s not real medicine. What was once rightly considered quackery has “evolved” to become first “complementary” and now “integrative,” the latter of which implies that co-equal modalities are being “integrated.” This evolution has occurred in less than 30 years, so now we even have a branch of the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) promoting magic, not to mention very wealthy foundations promoting the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine to produce quackademic medicine.

I’ve been pointing out time and time again that “integrative” medicine is largely nothing more than “integrating” quackery and magic with scientific medicine, at least when integrative medicine is not concerned with co-opting areas of scientific medicine, such as nutrition, exercise, and the like, as being somehow “alternative” to be “integrated.” Leave it to my good bud Mark Crislip to come up with the perfect analogy for this “best of both worlds” propaganda:

Typically when we think of flying things and influenza viruses, the first images that come to mind are wild waterfowl. Waterbirds are reservoirs for an enormous diversity of influenza viruses, and are the ultimate origin of all known flu viruses. In birds, the virus replicates in the intestinal tract, and can be spread to other animals (including humans) via fecal material.

However, a new paper expands a chapter on another family of flying animals within the influenza story: bats.

I’ve written previously about the enormous diversity of microbes that bats possess. This shouldn’t be surprising–after all, bats are incredibly diverse themselves, encompassing about a fifth of all known mammalian species. Though rabies is probably the most famous bat-associated virus, other viruses that have been isolated from bats include Nipah and Hendra viruses, SARS coronavirus, Chikungunya virus, Japanese and St. Louis encephalitis viruses, Hantaan virus (a relative of the Sin Nombre hantavirus), and filoviruses, among many others. And of course, a bat->pig->human cross-species infection ended up being a plot line in the recent movie, Contagion (modeled after Nipah virus). However, bats still remain chronically under-studied, despite the fact that they can carry so many potential human pathogens.

This new research expands our knowledge of bat viruses a bit. The authors examined 316 bats from eight locations in Guatemala in 2009-10. Rectal swabs were obtained and screened for influenza virus using molecular methods (looking for influenza virus RNA). Three of the samples tested positive, and all were from little yellow-shouldered bats (Sturnira lilium). This could indicate some clustering and transmission of the virus within bat colonies–and indeed, two of the bats were from the same area in the same year (2009). However, the third bat was captured in 2010 at a location 50 km away from the other two, suggesting that the virus may be more widespread than in just one colony.

When we discuss the epidemiology of influenza viruses, we talk about two genes: the HA gene, which encodes the hemagglutinin protein and allows the virus to bind to host cells; and the NA gene, which encodes the neuraminidase protein and allows the virus to leave an infected cell and spread to others. This is where the “H1N1″ or “H5N1″ nomenclature come from. The novel bat virus was a completely new H type–type 17 (provisional, they note, pending further analyses). The NA gene was also highly divergent, but they are awaiting further analyses to more definitively classify this gene. (Currently there are 9 recognized types of NA genes).

Though they weren’t able to culture out the flu viruses, the authors did do some molecular work suggesting that these novel bat viruses could combine with human viruses and form a functional recombinant virus. What implications could this have for human health? Well, hard to say. We still know very little about all the implications of any distinct type of avian influenza virus, or swine influenza virus, much less something completely foreign like bat flu. It’s interesting that, like birds, influenza virus in bats was found in the intestine (though lung samples were also positive). Can it cause an intestinal infection as well as an upper respiratory infection (the latter being more common in other mammal species)? Does it cause any signs of disease in infected bats at all? If they can get this bat virus to grow, all sorts of interesting lines of research are just waiting.

The article also mentions that seroepidemiological studies are currently being carried out to better understand the epidemiology of bat flu. Looking at PubMed, there is one reference to some similar studies carried out in the early 1980s, but I can’t access anything beyond the title. There also is a report of H3N2 influenza in bats in Kazakhstan, but that article is in Russian and also not readily available. Either way, everything old is new again, and it looks like interest in bat influenza has resurfaced after a 30-year lull. Who knows what else we’ll find lurking out there as interest continues to increase in the wildlife microbiome.

But if, as Santorum suggests, you do go on and read the speech, you will discover that Kennedy never said that people of faith have no role in the public square or that faith is not allowed there. He did, however, articulate a number of positions that Santorum should be asked if he agrees with. Here’s the questionnaire:

As a lover of children’s books, especially classic ones with timeless wisdom for grown-ups, and an admirer of minimalist posters that distill complex stories or ideas in clean graphic elements, I am infinitely delighted by these hyper-minimalist takes on beloved children’s classics by designer Christian Jackson.

Even as the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia was causing national outrage, Pennsylvania conservatives were quietly pushing a even more restrictive abortion bill. The legislation is designed with so many difficult and differing restrictions that long-time abortion policy analyst Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute told Raw Story, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

In addition to mandating the much-maligned transvaginal ultrasound requirements since rejected by the state of Virginia, Pennsylvania legislators proposed strongly encouraging women to view and listen to the ultrasounds, forcing technicians to give the women personalized copies of the results and mandating how long before any abortion the ultrasound much be preformed — and that’s just for starters.

That last requirement has already been passed and struck down in Louisiana, partially over concerns of patients’ privacy and potential risks for women in abusive relationships, Nash said.

“This bill definitely suffers the legislators-playing-doctor problem. … There are a number of requirements in this bill that are medically unnecessary,” Nash said, pointing out that so many requirements packed into the 22-page bill could make it logistically difficult for abortion providers to comply with them. “This bill is something that would be unacceptable to most women seeking an abortion.”

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund continues to receive donations and offers of help from various stakeholders. We are actively working with several organizations in order to make CSLDF a one-stop resource for scientists looking for legal resources and we are currently pursuing several educational and legal initiatives which will be made public in the future.

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